Well, can we start just with a little bit about you? I want to know more about your journey through your PhD and building your own practice and raising four kids all the way up to your book.

Yeah, I'll try to keep it relatively brief so it's not the entire podcast, but it certainly was a little more circuitous than I planned.

Right.

So I am like a type A planner.

And I decided maybe when I was like three, my parents will say I emerged from the womb with a stethoscope in hand like I was going to be a doctor.

That was the plan.

And I did all of the things kind of pointing at that goal.

Can technology play a role in helping ambitious mothers or does it just continue to raise the stakes for us?

So let's start there because I do think that a lot of times we feel like we have to choose between ambition and our children.

Yeah.

You know, I think that the first piece of that is so often when we feel overwhelmed as moms, we're essentially told to want less, be less ambitious, just put a few balls down and stop doing so much as if our want is the problem.

Yes.

And for me, I feel like there's, you know, there's two issues with that.

One is that's just another way to keep women small and police women, literally, metaphorically, etc.

But also for so many women that I work with and myself included.

What are your thoughts on work-life balance?

Talk to us a little bit about the structure of the book.

Yeah, it starts with the central question of essentially why is working motherhood feel impossible at this point? And I named something I call the ambition paradox, which is the sense of we're being pulled in two directions that are labeled as competitive, right? And we are told that if you are working, you are abandoning your children.

If you are being a good mom, you can't possibly be showing up at work while these are two things that have a zero sum game.

And so often we try to solve that problem by spreading ourselves thinner and thinner and thinner between the two so that we become transparent in our own lives, right? And we don't even know what we want or who we are or recognize ourselves.

And we keep doubling down on solutions of working harder and harder and harder that are actually really disconnecting ourselves from our true needs and wants and desires.

And so that is kind of the core of the question.

And so the first part talks about how did we get here? So that's a little bit of mixture of sociology, psychology, looking at the current picture of working motherhood and motherhood in particular in the last 20 years.

What that means is there's like way more emotional caretaking of feelings and trying to teach responsibility and being a good human and, driving the places and like and being accessible that like honestly i don't think my i don't know what our life would have looked like if i continued in big law just the options and availability that we our children have now because my husband and i both work from home is like i just don't know how other people are making it work so like what what advice do you have for people who are in this like middle chunk now, the time where everyone says that they need you the most.

Well, just to begin, I know I read a little bit about your bio, but would love for you to walk us through your career journey, um, a little bit about your motherhood journey, and then what's led you to create the programs and work that you- you're doing currently.

Yeah.

So career's been a little circuitous and definitely informed by motherhood.

Like, the two kind of have interplayed.

I, um, I actually started out wanting to be a doctor.

My- both of my parents were doctors, my mom and my father.

Um, so I think it was a little bit of what I saw modeled.

Would just love to hear a little bit more about what are some of the tenets and philosophies that you sh- you share in your book.

What was the moment you realized the way that we talk about ambition and motherhood wasn't working?

Yeah, I was a pretty ambitious person as a child.

And even as an into my twenties, I knew when I was a kid, I was going to be a doctor.

I did all the right things.

I went to nerd camp and took extra science and I got all the way into medical school acceptance.

And I was really ambitious for achievement, I think at the time.

And I held that letter in my hand and all of a sudden I knew I didn't want it anymore, that I had been ambitious for the achievement of it, not actually the thing.

And when we only talk about

How do you define that?

This is such an important question to this question of healthy striving as well, right? Because so often we think about ambition as, like, climbing the career ladder, right? And when we think about a ladder, it's like rung after rung.

You go straight to the top.

It really only leaves room for ambition around title, money, power.

And the other part of the ladder model of ambition is that if we are not actively climbing it, we are seen as failing.

We have fallen off the ladder.

It's very black and white.

As we close here, what are some of your final words, either of just general insight or encouragement to women who are listening and they have traditional careers, they wanna be great at their jobs, they also have children, and they are also trying to be a good friend and to have quality relationships? Any final thoughts for the woman who lives at that intersection?

Yeah

... work is certainly asking more and more and more of us, and most jobs expect you to be accessible twenty-four/seven, so that is part of it.

But also we're asking mothers to do way more than we ever used to, and I've really seen this play out in real time in my own motherhood journey, and certainly comparing it to my older sister who's about 10 years older and who had kids 10 years before I did, and kind of the expectations on her as a mom versus what I experienced was remarkably different.

Almost feels like the more women achieve at work, the more we're being asked to do at home.

Like, we keep upping the ante of like, "Well, can you do this? Can you still work if we ask you to do this?" It almost feels intentional.

You know, the stats are pretty clear.

Women who were home, at home mothers in the 1970s spent less time with their children than working k- mothers do now, right? We're asking mothers to do so much more in terms of emotional regulation, logistics management.

Yeah

What is that? Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves?

I think it's kind of a two-part answer, like the systems level and then the individual level.

On a systems level, we are being asked to do more than ever before, and so we've escalated what we're asking people to do from a work perspective in terms of being constantly available, right? It's like, yeah, we can work from home, but now we're supposed to work 24/7 and always answer those emails and those Slack messages, et cetera.

But we've really escalated what we're asking of the modern mother, too.

One of my favorite stats to share is that women today that are working out of the home full time spend more time with their children than women that were at home in the '70s did.

We are asking mothers to spend more time with their kids, and mothers are not just supposed to keep their kids alive.

They are supposed to be the household chief operating officer and the group therapist of their home and the logistics cruise director.

Is this kind of what you're talking about, or can you expand upon that a little further?

Can you share an overview, uh, about the book?

Yeah.

You know, Ambitious Mother is a mixture of explaining why working parenthood and working motherhood has gotten so hard, right? So it starts with some background, the context, how did we get here? Um, and then it moves into talking about what can we do about it internally? How can we make some shifts ourselves? And then it also talks about some of the systemic pieces.

So what can workplaces do? What can male partners do? But woven throughout that is also a lot of clinical storytelling from my work with clients, some personal storytelling, um, some interviews with well, better-known, um, actual ambitious mothers.

And I think to your point of why, you know, why should men even pay attention to this episode, you know, two things.

One, like you said, being a better partner, but two, a lot of the concepts that I talk about apply to fathers as well because at, at its heart, I'm talking about broadening ambition and moving from this idea that the only way to be ambitious is to kinda climb the career ladder, and thinking about ambition as something that exists on a wider web, where there's room for pivots and changes and rest and, you know, kind of reframing ambition from power and status only to ambition for connection or for care or for growth or impact or anything else that we could put, um, our kinda desires towards, right? So even though it is a book for mothers, there's a lot, I think, in the messaging that fathers can take as well.

Mm

...

And if that's what someone needs to hear, I am happy to share it again.

One of the things that I did not fully understand as a mom to young children and kind of only come to understand now is how important it is to take care of myself.

Right.

And so if I have more capacity, I'm going to access regulation better.

And I help a lot of clients by talking about self-care as family care.

Right.

So it used to be that my mentality was if I'm going to go work out for an hour and I let my kids have screens, I'm being, quote, a bad mom because I'm depriving them of that time with me.

And then if we turn the mirror around ourselves and say, "What do we want?" I'm sure that many women listening to this will be going and pausing going, "I don't know." And it's probably going, this is quite a, a big-- It, it might sound very simple question, but it's a really hard question no doubt to answer articulately.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I, I, I kinda say that w- for a woman to ask herself what she wants is a really radical, revolutionary act because from the minute we're born, we're told that that is irrelevant, right? We are told to be good girls and to make everybody else happy.

And then you layer on top of that motherhood, and a lot of times we essentially equate motherhood with martyrdom.

Right? And completely foregoing your sense of self.

By the time we become parents, we've had, you know, 30, 40 years of ignoring our ne- needs under our belt.

Um, and I don't wanna put up with crap in an organization, but now I know, okay, this is what I'm about.

Tell us a little bit more about it.

At its heart, it is a love story to motherhood and mothers.

And the central message that I clarified as I was writing Conclusion is that you matter as a mom, right? So often we take moms out of the story.

It's about their kids.

There's no room for their needs, their wants, certainly not room for their desires.

And I see a lot of moms focusing on, do I deserve this? Rather than simply, do I desire it? And so walking back from there, right, from this message of you matter and wanting to help women get there, to understand that they matter.

I talked through four parts.

Would you share something about each of your children? It doesn't have to be anything too personal, but it could be something you love, a characteristic, a struggle, a particular point of pride, anything.

wants the red cup instead of the blue cup how we sort of negotiate with them how we deal with their emotions I mean I have a three and a five year old and I feel like what I do more now is emotional like management of their like emotions and they're upset about something but how do I get them to like I don't know negotiate with it between each other so I'd love to hear more about that because I think that's evidence that our audience is looking for and how motherhood is an advantage and the leadership skills behind that

Yeah, yeah.

And I think I don't want to like ignore the fact that there is, again, to the systems and the, right, like both levels, motherhood means you have to work less hours, right, to some extent.

And it also means that, and there is a very real motherhood penalty, right? If we look at the gender wage gap, it is actually predominantly a motherhood wage gap because the wages, the wage gap increases significantly after the birth of your first child, right? And there is prejudices against mothers in the workplaces.

There's all sorts of problems.

And I think when we only have that story, then we start to see ourselves through that lens.

And that's the problem, right? Then it's like, oh, yeah, my kid is sick.

So talk to us more about that.

But let, let me ask you, in your work, what are some of the questions we should be asking ourselves to even know if we're on the right track?

Yeah.

The tool I like to kind of, or the analogy I like to give people to think about this is do a closet clean-out.

Right? So we all know what a closet clean-out looks like when it's, we're talking about clothes.

And you take everything in your closet, you put it on the bed, and you go through it, and you say, "Where did I get this? Do I, does it still fit me? Do I actually like it? Do I feel comfortable in it?" Like itchy sweater, it goes in the giveaway bin.

The jeans that I had before pregnancy, let's get rid of those, they don't fit anymore.

Right? And then you only put the things back in the closet that actually fit and are comfortable.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

So I didn't, you know, it wasn't like I knew totally that I was a perfectionist, but I knew that I was pretty achievement oriented and that that show- would show up in different places.

And, you know, it was interesting because it's something that I did a lot of work on in high school, and then it resurfaced in a different way in college and I thought I really put it to bed then.

And I think I, in graduate school in particular, did a lot of kinda deep work healing that piece.

And then lo and behold, I have children, and guess what shows right back up again because it's just something that I cared so deeply about.

So perfectionism I was kind of well aware of, um, for a long period of time, but these other p- pieces, the, the people pleasing, I think I didn't really start to understand where that had showed up and played a role in my life in ways that I didn't expect, um, until I was a parent and kind of seeing all of the ways in which I was trying to make everybody else happy.

Um, and, and started to see it in so many of my clients, right? That al- almost everyone on some level was struggling with this idea of I need to make myself small.

Can you do both of them at the same time?